Another River

The friends have gone home far up the valley of that river into whose estuary the man from England sailed in his own age in time to catch sight of the late forests furring in black the remotest edges of the majestic water always it appeared to me that he arrived just as an evening was beginning and toward the end of summer when the converging surface lay as a single vast mirror gazing upward into the pearl light that was already stained with the first saffron of sunset on which the high wavering trails of migrant birds flowed southward as though there were no end to them the wind had dropped and the tide and the current for a moment seemed to hang still in balance and the creaking and knocking of wood stopped all at once and the known voices died away and the smells and rocking and starvation of the voyage had become a sleep behind them as they lay becalmed on the reflection of their Half Moon while the sky blazed and then the tide lifted them up the dark passage they had no name for